Suitcase Nuke

I know he was filling in for someone I've never heard of who was sick. But, he is a big-bucks musician, right? No excuse. Just before the Daytona 500 started, my friend texted me about his awful performance. I agreed, so I'll just post my reply below.

Ahhhh! It was disgusting. It was like an easy-listening version. Slow, passionless and tone-deaf, too. I was enjoying my usual annoyance of drivers too cool to put their hand on their chest, but Gavin DeGraw definitely drew all of my ire. It literally took all of the momentum out of the pre-race festivities. It's as if he believed America had died, so he sang a gentle, somber version. And I use the word "sang" in the broadest way possible.

Just awful. I have never heard a worse performance of the national anthem. They should use only local amateurs, who usually nail their chances. Or take Kristen Chenoweth along to every race.

Any time I hear One Tree Hill's theme ever again, I'll only think of his incredible awfulness.

It's time we just had the military bands play the anthem.

UPDATE: I initially missed the fact that Mr. DeGraw's last name has two capital letters. I didn't change the title of the post for fear of invalidating the link. Besides, this is the new media, right? We don't worry about accuracy anymore.

UPDATE 2: Apparently DeGraw performed the national anthem at the Daytona 500 in 2006 as well. While still not my ideal performance, it went much better then.

Click here to listen to his 2006 performance.

I found an archive of quite a few national anthem performances here in good old-fashioned wav format. Kristin Chenoweth is on there, too, but from an earlier performance than the one I recall. Still good, but her appearance in 2008, I believe was the best I've ever heard.

As you probably already know, Phil Schiller announced at January's MacWorld that iTunes now had DRM-free licenses with the big four, and would roll out iTunes Plus to all content over the coming year. Well, at first, the upgrade option was very simple: you could upgrade your entire library for the total price. ($.30 per song) I would love to do that eventually, but with nearly 400 songs eligibile, the total was over $80.

Fortunately, you now have the option to upgrade by song and by album. I promptly initiated an updgrade for my Third Day albums, Trans-Siberian Orchestra albums, and of course, my Johnny Cash albums. They were the available ones that were most important to me. So go upgrade, with twice the bitrate and the freedom to copy, burn and play on any device anywhere, anytime forever, it's worth it.